forty years in the desert

In which our Hero is only now realizing that his worldview hasn’t changed but part of his world has

When I was a child, I wasn’t anything, just a kid who went to church. Religion wasn’t really an idea to me until I got older, where the combination of exposure to stranger classmates and my dive into speculative fiction gave me awareness of my faith as a relative conception, different and distant from some and similar and close to others. I learned about the brachial evolution of Christianity and how my religion was actually only one of many that claim to be the true inheritors of what Christ taught. Eventually I got older still and started to have conversations that included discussing my faith and that was where I discovered something: Adding up all the bits of what I believe comes out to a result that doesn’t match up with the religion I describe myself as a part of.

I am a Catholic, I explain as a quick and simple shorthand. Except I’m not prescriptively religious, I’m prefer action over debate about the rectitude of doctrine, and I disagree with some of the major doctrinal points of the faith I call my own. I think that the creation story is an metaphorical tale that covers the aggregation of stars and planets and the evolution of life. I think that birth control is closer to a responsibility than a sin. I think sexuality isn’t a sin, homo- or skim-, beyond the simple rule that the participants give informed consent to what they’re doing. By which means that the situation with priests abusing kids is especially evil and requires a zero-tolerance response.

Add it up and I’m a Catholic outsider. I’m at the fringes of the faith, one of a variety of dissenters who see value in what is provided and problems in how it’s executed. That’s how I explained my beliefs for anybody who asked during the tenure of the Catholic leader, Pope John Paul II. Then came Pope Benedict and with him came changes to the words of the service, more formality, more doctrine, and more rigid resistance to the outside. Dogma over karma.

It was okay, in its way. Pope Benedict made me more sure that I was a back-of-the-church Catholic, that I’d just believe what I believed and describe myself with “But”s and “Except”s to show where I am not supporting the ongoing incomprehensible acceptance of the evil that was done by the priests who were supposed to be sheltering us. I feel so angry, so disappointed, that the church’s response to discovering abuses was to turn the other cheek. I don’t disagree with compassion, but I think that compassion for the wolf is not to put him back with the sheep. The church should have apologized. They should have asked for forgiveness. It’s in the words we say, every single week. It’s in the words that we pray. It’s fundamental to the ideas of humility and honesty and…

I am angry. I am angry about that situation. I feel like the church pulled a “Do as I say, not as I do.” I think it has been an incatholic approach to a serious problem and it pushed me away. It made me feel less connected. Thus my religious identity as an adult, an unhappy, diffident, outsider Catholic.

Somehow, very recently, it came up in conversation that I go to church and I mentioned that while I wouldn’t call myself particularly religious, I was pretty pleased with some of what I was hearing from the current pope. And as I was mentioning some of the things I’d heard, like the head of the Catholic church saying about homosexuality, “Who am I to judge.” I like Pope Francis’s general humility, just for how much it disturbs the protocol people that he won’t stay in the official apartments.

For all that I like about him, he is the Pope, chief prelate of the Catholic church, CEO for one of the few organizations that stretches back millienia. He’s got some obligations to the shareholders, so to speak. Without any cynicism, the weight of responsibility that comes with that is crushing to even imagine. Every single thing he says must be weighed, against the reactions of his people, against the reactions of other religions, against the reactions of the heads of states, and against whatever obligation he has to the, uh, chairman of the board. Change is slow and measured. Too slow, and the progressives schism away. Too fast and the conservatives abandon you as a sect offender.

This is not my first rodeo. I’ve got a developed and nuanced understanding of bureaucracies and large organizations, and this is my third pope. My expectations were pragmatically hopeful. But then he started to talk: The people of God want pastors, not clergy acting like bureaucrats or government officials. The bishops, particularly, must be able to support the movements of God among their people with patience, so that no one is left behind. But they must also be able to accompany the flock that has a flair for finding new paths.

Another time: The dogmatic and moral teachings of the church are not all equivalent. The church’s pastoral ministry cannot be obsessed with the transmission of a disjointed multitude of doctrines to be imposed insistently

Again from the same interview: We cannot insist only on issues related to abortion, gay marriage and the use of contraceptive methods he said, and later We have to find a new balance; otherwise even the moral edifice of the church is likely to fall like a house of cards.

Or how about this from an address he gave: However, your main task is not to build walls but bridges; it is to establish a dialogue with all men, also with those who do not share the Christian faith, but “have the veneration of high human values,” and even “with those who oppose the Church and persecute her in various ways” (the quotes appear to be references he was quoting in those remarks).

He says he’s a son of the church, that he does not doubt or dispute the doctrines. But with so few words he’s given me more hope than I can remember having for the religion I was born in than I can recall having had since it became a religion and not just what happened on a Sunday. Not that I was self-aware enough to process that surprise, because I only discovered it in this conversation where I was admitting to my enjoying his general niceness. It hit me that for the first time in my lifetime, I’m hearing the leader of my faith speak encouragingly about the things that things I believe are deeply and truly important. Suddenly I’m aware that I can’t describe myself as a intellectually aware rebel against an ancient order. Suddenly my religion has shifted to stand at the back of the church with me. Suddenly I’m hearing a view that makes me feel part of it.

The visiting priest at this past Sunday’s mass had a truth of it in his comments: “The progressive Catholics are cheering ‘Yay! Yay!’ and the conservative Catholics are chanting ‘No! No!'” and so the whole thing becomes again a battle of wills and an evolution of doctrine as interpreted down the chain of command. And the Pope will eventually be promoted to head-office and the new regional manager maybe less a Francis and more a Michael Scott.

For now, I’m just taking it in. I don’t know if I trust what I’m seeing, but it is more positive a position than I have ever seen. For now all I have to do to explain my beliefs seems to be to call myself a Catholic. And wonder how Lucifer would have felt had God stopped in for tea.